Dr Bruce Sherman Highlights Areas Where PBMs Can Help Employers

There are a number of areas where pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) can help support employers with the high-cost of specialty pharmacy drugs, but so far they have only been doing a good job in some priority areas, said Bruce Sherman, MD, FCCP, FACOEM, of Case Western Reserve, University School of Medicine and medical director of Population Health and Management Exchange Solutions with Buck Consultants at Xerox.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How can pharmacy benefit managers help employers get a grasp on specialty drug spending?

The issue for employers is that there is an ever-growing and expansive pipeline of specialty pharmacy drugs, and as such employers wil certainly benefit from support from the PBMs to control costs. To that end, the PBMs can certainly help by ensuring that they take as supportive of a role as they can in terms of ensuring that the right patient gets the right drug, at the right time, at the right cost, and in the right setting.

Those are really the primary group of targets. To this point, PBMs have been doing a reasonable job in some of those areas, but not all.